WRITING

Release Date: OCTOBER 24, 2025​

Publisher: the87press​

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This co-authored work focuses on five performances developed by Blue Pieta and Bhanu Kapil, a poet, between 2022 and 2025. A public notebook of working scores and performance writing, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PERFORMANCE contains analytic depictions of shared time experienced during performance, notes on dramaturgy and applause, and thinking towards performance as a mode of inter-generational healing (borderwork). This hybrid collection studies performance as a place both unknown and emergent, the rough sketch that's always incomplete, carried over to the next performance, and always in the company of radical others of many kinds. Both writers also change roles during the course of a performance, a mode of autobiography that most closely resembles mutation. A dramaturg is also an artist, a dancer, the poet of the work. A poet stands up from the table where they are seated to enter the domain of gesture and movement. Pieta and Kapil decompress an interoceptive approach to poetry, memory and ritual awareness: scenes that can't be written, but only staged.​

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PRAISE

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​“Autobiography of a Performance is an osmotic gift. Receive it with trembling hands, as its icy heart bleeds through paper, fabric, and skin. Pieta and Kapil’s choreography is borderwork in reverse, unpicking partitions, undoing bloody paradigms. Read this book or let it unspool you. Trace the lines of your body back through diasporic time; run into the parallax of love killed, love sought. ‘How will you live now?’ Pieta and Kapil ask, proffering the answers that we so desperately need in the torrential beauty of their encounters.” —Nisha Ramayya, author of States of the Body Produced by Love

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"The words of Bhanu and Blue coalesce in power in this precious sharing of their unique collaboration. Particularities amass to a broader take on the artistic possibilities afforded by performance itself, one that is based in flesh and kinship. With gratitude, I commend their unveiling of vulnerabilities, for they’ve forged a body of work that both stuns and nourishes.” —Rosalie Doubal, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance & Participation), Tate Modern

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“Autobiography of a Performance is a thrilling, perilous experiment in diasporic intimacy as collaborative writing. Kapil and Pieta share the body of a text, passing its raw heart between them. The production of interdependency is both brutal and tender, but the healing of ‘borderwork’ migrates across such absolute distinctions. As discrete forms of writing are destabilised, so too are national borders and familial boundaries, troubling histories of partition, population exchange, loss and shame.” —Katrina Palmer, Artist and Professor of Fine Art

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